Cry Moar, Mitch McConnell: Tweets of the Day

@Grumpy

“…but it is not because, as she claims, that there’s a “War on Boys,” and we need to make schools more boy-friendly, but that IMO we need to socialize boys to be more like girls in this respect.”

IMO the “sit down and shut up” way that we teach children is bad for both boys and girls. The pressure that we put on schoolchildren, and the dissappearance of outlets like recess, is getting ridiculous. IMO teaching boys to be more like girls will be just teaching them to internalize the stress (like girls are taught) rather than externalizing it.

Not that a heaping dose of gender essentialism like CHS parrots is going to fix anything….

To be fair, I do a lot of copy/paste from stackoverflow in my actual job. That’s what normal programming entails on a day to day basis.

You won’t advance to a senior technical position if that’s your limit though. You might become a manager.

outlets like recess

Recess, in my experience, wasn’t an “outlet”. It was being thrown out of the building into a yard full of merciless bullies, inadequate supervision, and, more often than not, god-awful weather, and not being let back in for 20 minutes. The adults seemed to do everything they could to avoid being available during that time, so that, say, one could stay close to one so that the bullies would not dare attack one. Because, of course, if the adults don’t see it it didn’t happen or it’s “his word against yours”.

Adult-me now understands that they just wanted 20 minutes free of responsibility, and to avoid paperwork and unpleasant confrontations with “little” Johnny’s big-shot mom or dad who sits on some influential board/owns half the town/whatevs, hence why the ones who drew the short straws and got posted outside did their utmost to be as useless as possible. But, of course, if they didn’t want to have to deal with disputes and bullying among children, and standing up to (sometimes wealthy or well-connected) parents whose children had misbehaved, then they should have picked different careers …

I got pretty good at sneaking back in, against the rules of course, and spending 20 minutes in the library, where I found much better company than any of the (alleged) human beings around.

I take it there are, or were, other schools that weren’t quite as terrible about such matters? Of course this is also based on 30-year-old memories that might not quite be 100% reliable.

@ surplus

god-awful weather, and not being let back in

When I was a prefect I just had a rule that the lower school kids could huddle round the radiators so long as they posted lookouts and scarpered if a teacher showed up.

-twitch, twitch-

ahmigah you guyse brogrammer college students are the absolute worst

Like, I was gonna talk about how complicated it is to make any changes in our terrible victorian-rote-education-system, but now all I can do is tighten the clamps on the boiler of my irritation at the brogrammer doods. Calm down fluttershy, calm down.

http://iambrony.steeph.tp-radio.de/mlp/gif/151193%20-%20animated%20fluttershy%20rainbow_dash.gif

Okay. First thing, education system. Every single educator out there knows that the traditional pedagogical style just doesn’t work. The crush of evidence is massive and in the faces of every teacher out there. That’s not the problem, the problem is of course far more stupid. It’s convincing the education boards and administrations, and the public-at-large.

Everyone knows that school sucks and it should be improved, but – well, look at New Math. Was introduced in Alberta some years ago, and is now gone. It was lambasted and hated by adults because it wasn’t like how they learned it. That crippled its ability to be taught, even though it’s a far more natural way to do math and makes higher level mathematics easier.

Everyone loves the idea of changing schooling to be better until the rubber meets the road, at which point every change is scary and wrong and why can’t you just do it the way I was taught I worked out just fine.

So, it’s hard! Especially when you add in the fact that a lot of school boards are made up of concerned parents who don’t know much about education, but they know what they want. (I’m not picking on parents here, I’m picking on the fact that many of them don’t try to educate themselves on the difficulties in pedagogy.)

Schoolin’s tough for everyone involved!

Now, those – eugh – college brogrammers. The absolute worst. Take every bad stereotype about doods and crank it up to eleven. Overconfidence in their skills with no justification? Check. “It isn’t cheating, every programmer copies stuff”? Check. “No one writes code raw, what do you mean I can’t use an IDE?” Check. STEM field arrogance, despite a shuddering lack of understanding for the methods of rationality? Check.

And on and on and on and on and ON. I love my work, but I hate my job, yanno? I want to do freelance work, but even then most of my clients would be businesses, and that sounds like a thick slice of bro culture to me, too.

Ugh. I should just finish making my game kickstarter and, like, be a hermit dork for a living. That sounds nice.

Boys don’t need to be socialized like girls. There are problems with both models. Children should be socialized to be good, compassionate, thoughtful people. That’s my opinion anyways.

As for school socialization, there are dozens of ways to categorize and understand how students best learn. The learning medium through which they best learn is the best known one, but it’s woefully incomplete. No one has a “best” learning method, really. It’s not like a Reading Learner is always a Reading Learner. The best way to learn varies by subject, by student, and by day. The best educational techniques are multimodal, and allow students to engage in the way that best suits them at that moment, for that subject.

One of the better ways to do that is through a (very radical) pedagogical method called Active Learning. It’s a lot more natural and enjoyable, and reduces anxiety in students. Kids that come through those programs tend to enjoy learning and are very active, engaged, polymath sort of people as adults.

An example school that I’ve examined is the Sudbury Valley School, which is really worth diving into if you’re interested in the subject. They’re really approacheable, very nice, and are happy to send you an info package if you’re curious! Expensive to send your child, but even if you don’t do that there’s still a lot to learn from how they do things.

Actually improving the school experience for kids to the point where they want to learn is a hard thing, and I’m convinced that incremental change won’t get us there. It’s tough!

At my school, you could describe brogrammers as people with the worst qualities of frat boys, with all those qualities magnified. Imagine people who think they’re better than everyone else because they’re Ruby on Rails developers (meaning they know how to use an IDE and copy code from Stack Overflow and public GitHub repos), but they express intense disdain (with no sense of irony) for anyone who’s remotely polymath-ish.

Imagine people who think they’re better than everyone else because they’re Ruby on Rails developers

OMG, don’t even get me started on Ruby on Rails developers.

I think traditional school methods hurt girls too, since girls are expected to be the calm, attentive ones.

Anecdata, but I got in trouble a lot through grades 1-9 because I had trouble sitting down and being quiet. It also seemed to me that boys who were noisy/active got in trouble less often.

Now, I did have temper/selfishness problems that needed modification, but hyperactivity shouldn’t be treated like A Problem. Oh, and I’d also doodle on tests and assignment papers, which was practically a crime in upper elementary school 😀 One of my teachers solved the doodling problem by giving me a drawing pad and letting me use it in class. I was awed by her generosity (for some reason I had the idea that paper was expensive) and didn’t draw (much) on assignment papers after that. 🙂

WWTH –

We also got free time in classroom to read or do educational play or projects.

That was one of my favourite parts of class.

JS –

Hogwart’s has some serious pedagogical issues, too.

😀

@Scild
I’m crying, here! Such shade!

People have been criticizing the educational system from a progressive point of view as long as I can remember — when I was young it was A. S. Neill’s book Summerhill (published 1960), about the ground-breaking English school of the same name he founded — but nothing much really changes. My comment that boys need to be socialized to be more like girls was based on the assumption that nothing much is going to change in the near future, and that being the case, girls are better socialized for school as it is than boys are. I agree that at the present time schools are far too regimented for all students in the early grades. But a lot of the parents I knew — themselves well-educated — were very competitive about things like relatives ages at which their kids could, say, recite the alphabet, even though there’s no evidence that ten years later it makes any difference to how well a student can read for comprehension or write effectively.

The thing is, there’s a tremendous inertia in the system — too many vested interests; for example, multiple-guess standardized testing may not be a very good way to assess students’ actual understanding of subjects, but too many people make too much money from it to let it fade away to its mostly deserved oblivion.

And then you get the various irrationalities, like some years ago (and maybe even today) the Christian fundamentalist community decided that Phonics was the only godly way to learn to read and that Whole Language was a Satanic Communist plot to enslave children.

My favorite anecdata from my short tenure as a middle-school math teacher almost 50 years ago was that you could tell which town the students came from by the errors they made. If you asked a student to divide 5 into 25 and they got 311 for an answer, you knew they were from Mont Vernon rather than Milford or Amherst. (They could all tell you how many nickels were in a quarter quite readily, but of course math had nothing to do with real life. I was never sure that teaching math, before students were intellectually ready to understand that math is mostly just a generalized way of handling real-world situations, didn’t do more harm than good.)

Oh, by the way, if by New Math we are talking about the system that gained some popularity in the 1960’s, what I discovered was that for college-bound students, and particularly those who wanted to major in STEM fields, New Math was a good thing. It is helpful for example to understand the principles of a place-value numeral system — that ABC base n means A x n^2 + B x n^1 + C x n^0, and that our decimal system is just the special case where n = 10, and that other bases may be more useful in certain cases. On the other hand, for the non-college-bound, whose main need was for life-skills math — balance a checkbook, understand how to budget, etc., in the everyday world of base 10 — it was just an unnecessary confusion to people whose skills were shaky in the first place.

@Grumpy, I can’t help it – I have to ask: how can one get 25/5 = 311?
(I’m assuming this is some kind of word confusion about the expression “divide into”??? I’m more used to hearing it said either “divided by” with the dividend listed first and the divisor second, or said just as divisor “into” dividend but without using the word “divided”. Or is the problem something quite different?)

Opposable: So you look at 5 into 25 and you make an initial guess that it will go in at least 3 times. So you do the standard thing and you come up with a remainder of 10. You are supposed to notice that the remainder is greater than the divisor and go back and change the answer to 4 and work it out again, notice that the remainder is 5, and go back and change the answer to 5. What they would do is write 31 instead of 4, and then 311 instead of 5. It’s what happens when you teach a method by rote without understanding what you are doing (i.e., what division IS), so you don’t notice that the answer is ridiculous — because math is just some silly thing they make you learn that has nothing to do with things like, say, figuring out how much allowance you’ll have to save to buy a certain toy.

The thing is, most people don’t need to study differential equations (I took linear algebra instead in college [and I was an English major]), but totally innumerate people are at a terrible disadvantage in the modern world.

I meant to say in my previous post that while I think that schools ARE in general far too regimented for young children, if you want to acquire the skills to be a high-functioning (and decently paid) member of society, at some point you have to learn to be able to sit quietly and have enough of an attention span to listen to or read the information you need to know and put in whatever time and effort is required to understand it — and the socialization of girls tends to make them better at that. In the long run, if you tend to cut corners or even cheat, at some point you will come up against the barrier of not having developed the skills and understanding that you need. (College math minor here; son-in-law, husband, and father of computer professionals.)